Celeno lands French major IPTVer for its video WiFi

Israeli WiFi video specialist Celeno has landed another major IPTV supplier in Bouygues Telecom which said it would put the Celeno chip in its next-ge

By PETER WHITE

Published: 2 June, 2011

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Israeli WiFi video specialist Celeno has landed another major IPTV supplier in Bouygues Telecom which said it would put the Celeno chip in its next-generation Bbox.

Bouygues Telecom set the French IPTV world alight in 2010, coming very late to the IPTV party it signed up over 400,000 new subs in 2010, taking the total to 525,000 in under two years. Its third placed mobile service has over 11 million customers but it has just 808,000 fixed broadband lines. At its current rate it will have more IPTV customers than that inside a year and it has done it after France Telecom and Free have dominated the IPTV market in France for years.

This Celeno deal is just the type of thing that keeps the Bouygues offers attractive. The Celeno chip initially made inroads at China Telecom and in March it claimed that it had broken through into Deutsche Telekom’s T-Entertain services, though no official confirmation of that has been forthcoming. Deutsche Telekom has around 1.1 million IPTV homes in Germany and has controlling ownership in other pay TV players around Europe which might also use the Celeno chip if it works out in Germany.

The Celeno chip can power either set tops or point to multipoint video bridges and uses a breakthrough 6 antenna MIMO WiFi chip, which Celeno claims can deliver HD video with virtually “zero visual artifacts.” Along with others, such as Turkey’s Airties and Quantenna in the US, there is a growing tendency to build such devices with MIMO and use advanced beamforming, alongside special video aware firmware which pre-calculates the optimum delivery channel for the next video packet.

In March CEO Gilad Rozen told Faultline that “the China Telecom deal is now shipping in the low tens of thousands,” and in August last year Liberty Global said its Horizon hybrid cable-OTT set top would have the chip in it, though that won’t ship until late in the fourth quarter.

Celeno has also announced a deal with Israel’s leading satellite TV provider Yes, and Sweden’s Inteno, one of the leading suppliers of CPE equipment to service providers in the Nordic market. Celeno is also known to be trialing with Orange in France, which is perhaps why Bouygues wanted to get in early.

Bouygues Telecom launched its IPTV and triple play system back in October 2008 almost entirely installed by troubled consumer electronics maker Technicolor – which made the home gateways, IPTV middleware, VoIP and carried out systems integration. It’s almost certain that Technicolor is also building the new Bbox, as it built the last two versions. It also owns the software that drives the France Telecom Orange TV service in France, so don’t be surprised to see the Celeno chip turning up there.

The 800,000 fixed lines Bouygues uses are wholesaled ADSL2+ lines from Completel, and some it has installed from scratch. Bouygues Telecom is part of an overall diversified building and engineering group.